Forever's beta in nine panels: 8.8 million characters and one very deadly Kobold Miner

Blizzard closed out the Forever beta with a scorecard. A post from the official Warcraft account on 30 October carried a nine-panel graphic headed "Beta by the Numbers", and its caption singled out one panel: "Villagers speak in hushed tones about the legend of the dreaded Kobold miner…" The same day's WoW Weekly roundup made the same joke under the heading "Big Numbers, Legendary Heroes": "Who knew that an unassuming Kobold miner could be so deadly?"

The nine panels

Three panels look at the characters players made, though the second is labelled only "Skyborne":

• 8,862,354 characters created
• 1,889,084 Skyborne
• 612,096 Forsaken Paladins

Three are about how people died or fought:

• 9,959,014 PvP kills
• 1,248,125 duels fought
• 1,157,204 deaths from falling

And three name a winner rather than a number:

• Deadliest dungeon: The Hall of Thanes
• Deadliest creature: Kobold Miner
• Zone with most PvP: Hillsbrad Foothills

Falling killed characters nearly as often as players fought duels, and there were more PvP kills than characters created. If the Skyborne and Forsaken Paladin panels count characters out of that same total, which the graphic doesn't spell out, they would be about one in five and about one in fourteen. The roundup also points to a new short story, "Unbowed", about a Forsaken former Scarlet Crusader asking whether a Forsaken can still serve the Light.

What the numbers can't tell you

Characters are not players. One person could make many beta characters, so 8.86 million says nothing about how many people tested the game, how many bought it or how full launch will be. The graphic gives no time period and no method.

The superlatives have the same limit. "Deadliest" with no attempt counts behind it can't separate a hard dungeon from a popular one, or a dangerous creature from one that a lot of new characters happened to meet. Nothing here tells you to fear The Hall of Thanes at launch, or that Hillsbrad will be the busiest PvP zone on your server.

One small wrinkle: the image's accessibility description says "Undead Paladins" and "deadliest enemy". We've used the wording printed on the graphic. The description also calls the source player telemetry, the only hint Blizzard gives about where the numbers came from.

The post had about 82,900 views, 2,700 likes and 111 replies when we read it roughly 90 minutes after it went up. Blizzard's caption, at least, knew which panel it wanted people talking about.